Dev Diary #9: Demos, Deutsch, and Dangerous Bats

Hello everyone! Here’s a snippet-style update on what’s been happening with me lately:

After a couple of weeks of solid preparation, I finally did a fairly important exam today! I was worried it would turn out to be harder, but it went okay in the end. Of course, there are still a few assignments to be done and so on, but for now I’ve finally reached a small lull in the student-life action. (You know what that means… finally some time to work on Ambience again!)

Added a new enemy to the game, the Monster Bat. I’ve noticed a distinct lack of diverse enemies in Ambience at present, and I’d like to change that if I can to make gameplay a bit more interesting. On that note, I also recalled some feedback I received a while ago to make the range of weapons available to the player a bit broader as well, especially early on in the game. That, too, is in the works.

Text fixes. Lots and lots of text fixes. Making dialogue punchier, more engaging, more interesting; fleshing it out in places, cutting it back in others… working on writing has honestly been a lot more work than I anticipated. But it’s getting there! I’ve also finally moved on from the Mudreed Marsh mission (after a long time in a state of writer’s block) and am working on the rest of the story – hooray!

Well, if you’re saying I’m the legend, Vulcan, then yes, they most certainly are.

I’ve also been reconsidering the wisdom of releasing a demo before the final release of the game. If anything, having a completed game as the final aim, rather than a semi-completed demo, gives me a lot more motivation to finish the game. I think I’ll work on finishing the whole game for now before I start thinking about demo releases.

Finally… I think I may have mentioned this before, but I’m learning German at the moment and have decided to continue learning the language for the rest of this year and beyond. Just like my gamedev chronicles, I’ve found that learning a new language has been a really fun and interesting journey. With that in mind, I’ve been considering making the occasional German-learning related post interspersed amongst the gamedev posts for a bit of a change in pace.

(Just to clarify: the blog will remain primarily gamedev-related, of course, but just for a change I might make a post about my German-learning progress once in a while and see whether anyone finds it interesting. Mal sehen!)